The American Empire

by Scott Nearing

The workers of the United States are to-day following the lead of the most powerful group of financial imperialists in the world. The trail is a long one leading to world conquest, unimagined dizzying heights of world power, riches beyond the ken of the present generation, and then, the slow and terrible decay and dissolution that sooner or later overtake those peoples that follow the paths of empire. The rulers will wield the power and enjoy the riches. The people will struggle and suffer and pay the price.

The American plutocracy is out to conquer the earth because it is to their interest to do so. The will-o'-the-wisp of world empire has captured their imaginations and they are following it blindly.

The American people, on November 2, 1920, gave the American imperialists a blanket authority to go about their imperial business—an authority that the rulers will not be slow to follow. First they will clean house at home—that housecleaning will be called "the campaign for the establishment of the open shop." Then they will go into Mexico, Central America, China, and Europe in search of markets, trade and investment opportunities.

Behind the investment will come the flag, carried by battle-ships and army divisions. That flag will be brought front to front with other flags, high words will be spoken, blood will flow, life will ebb, and the imperialists will win their point and pocket their profit.

Behind them, in November, and at all other times of the year, there will be the will, expressed or implied, of the working people of the United States, who will produce the surplus for foreign investment; will make the ships and man them; will dig the coal and bore for the oil; will shape the machines. Their hands and the hands of their sons will be the force upon which the ruling class must depend for its power. They will produce, while the ruling class consumes and destroys.

The trail is a long one, but it leads none the less certainly to, isolation and death. No people can follow the imperial trail and live. Their liberties go first and then their lives pay the penalty of their rulers' imperial ambition. It was so in the German Empire. It is so to-day in the British Empire. To-morrow, if the present course is followed, it will be equally true in the American Empire.

5. The New Germany

One of the chief charges against the Germans, in 1914, was that they were not willing to leave their neighbors in peace. They were out to conquer the world, and they did not care who knew it. It was not the German people who held these plans for world conquest, it was the German ruling class. The German people were quite willing to stay at home and attend to their own affairs. Their rulers, pushed by the need for markets and investment opportunities, and lured by the possibilities of a world empire, were willing to stake the lives and the happiness of the whole nation on the outcome of these ambitious schemes. They threw their dice in the great world game of international rivalries—threw and lost; but in their losing, they carried not only their own fortunes, but the lives and the homes and the happiness of millions of their fellows whose only desire was to remain at home and at peace.

Germany's offense was her ambition to gain at the expense of her neighbors. Lacking a place in the sun, she proposed to take it by the strength of her good right arm. This is the method by which all of the great empires have been built and it is the method that the builders of the American Empire have followed up to this point. The land which the ruling class of the United States has needed has heretofore been in the hands of weak peoples—Indians, Mexicans, a broken Spanish Empire. Now, however, the time has come when the rulers of the United States, with the greatest wealth and the greatest available resources of any of the nations, are preparing to take what they want from the great nations, and that imperial purpose can be enforced in only one way—by a resort to arms. The rulers of the United States must take what they would have by force, from those who now possess it. They did not hesitate to take Panama from Colombia; they did not hesitate to take possession of Hayti and of Santo Domingo, and they do not propose to stop there.